"Personally, If there was a news item illustrating a BOC song EVERY Day, I believe I could be happy"

Present for ZRM!.

Police say they are trying to determine how a medical box containing a pair of eyeballs ended up in a trash bin at a gas station in Kansas City.
Police spokesman Steve Young says a worker at a Conoco station in the city's north called police after finding the cardboard box late Wednesday. The box was labeled, "Keep refrigerated."

Testing the re-entry heat shield

Of course some people will wonder "Is there really any scientific value in being the first blog to bring a blind albino penguin (Aptenodytes albus) safely from orbit back to Earth?" but to Thundra and ZRM such cavilers we can only say "Pshaw!" Also "Ogive"! and "knapsack!"

If the heatshield proves to be inadequate then no matter, we will have the world's first penguin hot-tub. Or soup, whichever comes first.

UPDATED with Bonus seabird cuisine:

Why is a mouse that spins?

Of course we knew Robert Naviaux back when he was paying his dues, playing small neighbourhood bars and researching dark chocolate as a cure for muscle dysfunction, heart disease and diabetes.*

Unexpected outcomes of ground-breaking

It is a truth universally acknowledged in our field of research that the royal road** to fame and fortune and laudatory headlines from goldfish-attention-span journalists is to send out a press release about the health benefits of chocolate. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something. The ground-breaking research at Riddled Laboratories with cocoa and godmeat gene transfection brought the reporters running, except they never actually reached us on account of the broken ground and the consequent exploding tanks and pteranodons. NOT THAT WE'RE BITTER.

But now Naviaux and his Mitochondrial and Metabolic Disease Centre have sold out and gone mainstream with a Curing Autism Mouse Study, and they have forgotten their old friends and no longer return the phone calls from Riddled.

But worse, they have stolen a Riddled discovery for making mice clumsy and socially-awkward! The trick is to reset their purinergic intra-cellular signalling channels by stressing them in utero with a poly(IC)-RNA simulated viral infection administered to the dams. As any fule kno.

The resulting adult mice fail the revolving pole-dance test, and in the Social Preference test they are more interested in a cage containing Lego blocks than in another cage containing a conspecific. Naviaux's press release calls this "a mouse model for autism" because a grant from an autism foundation was paying for the research.

At Riddled we are humane and ethical scientists and we stopped our experiments because the mice exhibit a wide range of other symptoms: general muscular weakness, neural deficits, metabolic dysfunction (although these can be warded off by treating the test animals with Suramin before they develop). Also the novelty and entertainment value of the mice wore off at the Mad Science monthly get-togethers -- a fickle audience, easily distracted by cheap gimcrack trumpery with TAQ polymerase and remote-controlled cyborg lobsters. Mainly, though, we were concerned that their super-intelligent fascination with the Lego blocks lay in the potential for assembling them into a ramp and escaping from the mouse enclosure and then world domination.



Suramin has a number of side-effects including ballistic organ syndrome though fewer than half the recipients "will require lifelong corticosteroid replacement". But with the tabloids heralding it as a cure for autism you can bet the equine beast of burden of your choice that it's already on sale from the autism quacks.

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* Research funded by the Hershey Corporation.

** BONUS Royal Road. You must be wearing a spiky gold spacesuit to use this thoroughfare.

Et in Akkadia ego

"When you look at the cultural role of Dr Who over the last five thousand years," sez I in the Explaining Voice, "he has always been a kind of Trickster archetype -- unconcerned with social strictures, even unstable in his physical boundaries. In the Sumerian city-states when tales of the Doctor and the Tardis first appear (as documented in cylinder seals from Uruk), the reason why his adventures appealed so much to the average peasant was the contrast between his taboo-breaking insouciance and the rigid, regimented temple-dominated society."

Tardis flanked by Khybermen

"You're making that up," Another Kiwi vouchsafed.

"It is Humour in Cuneiform," I said.

Trouble brewing

Part of the trouble was that Smut had to go and see his Aunt Griselda up north for a while. The poor dear has gone all Gender Uncertain what with the legalising of gay marriage here and dogs lying down with cats and the like. We have explained to her that it probably won't be all that much of a big deal to her because of she's a 700 year old devil-squid and ate her last 20 mates, but she will not be comforted unless Smut goes up there and takes a case of Old Fergussons Rusty Blade Stout with Prunes for Health.

So he left me and Space-Time Eddie in charge of the mashing of the malt for the Labour Day Big Red Beer. He explained what we had to do with this handy chart:

Which gave Eddie a headache so he ate it. This lead us to "Patrimininous Wilson's Big Book of Beer Making" which we found at the city landfill site once. It's a bit pecked by seagulls but page 7 shows the mashing process in stark yet compelling detail.

 

Now, Eddie is a not multi-dimensional being who reacts well to cellar pressure, I mean he is a dab hand at "Navigational problems in the higher gravitational vortices in sector 7G" or getting through the Tannhauser gate without paying but when you say, forcefully, "Eddie give me the fecking 3 inch spanner, pronto!" he tends to get all whimpering and hand wringing.

So we were a bit worried when the Riddled Board of Directors and Associated Big Cheeses turned up for the annual tasting of the Wort.  

We all got up in finest company livery and tigris played a selection of showtunes onna lute, which, to be frank, all sounded the same to me, but what do I know. Note the cunningly positioned bacon and eggs on the table and the large ice cream Sundae to take Lord and Lady Riddled's minds off the slightly "toasty" wort."There's only two bits of it" I had said "A and B, how hard can it be?"
Also Greenish Hugh is puffing coffee smells at the Big Wigs from bellows. Lord Riddled is just telling us how he cut Lord Scroop dead in The Strand whilst Smut and I make frantic hand signals to Evangeline van Holsterin's idiot boyfriend behind the curtain to let the hamster go so that Lord R will faint "Cain't abaide hamsters, doncha know" he says.
His Lordship is very interested in putting prunes into our beer but we have explained that there are religious reasons against it. Also Smut said, "these two muppets will turn it into jam".
And I'm just sayin', Beer Jam... For those "difficult" mornings.

SMUTDATE: M. Bouffant in comments is skeptical as to Aunt Griselda's existence forcing me to infringe upon her privacy and bring out the documentary evidence.

The Kathy Acker Memorial Cup for inadequately-digested re-use of someone else's words goes to...

...Gregory Benford and Larry Niven!

Looking through the menu, Cliff thought about the colors of edible food here. Evolution geared animals and people alike to like the colors of things that were good or benign -- blue for skies and clear water, white for snow. People disliked browns and dark colors linked to feces and rotten food, and reds that might mean spices or poisons. Plants had evolved those as warding-off signals.

Compare and contrast with Palmer & Schloss (2010):

 Taylor, Clifford & Franklin (2012):

Taylor et al. (2013):

Note use of blue to make cover art attractive

Gregory and Larry lose the plot in the last 16 words when they depart from the script and add their own thoughts. Which are wrong. Far from "a warding-off signal", plants evolved red pigments as attractants, to birds such as might pollinate them or spread the seeds. Hence the name, 'bird peppers'. Then they evolved spices like 'capsaicin' to deter mammals -- who are colour-blind and can't see red -- from eating the fruits.

Certain primates have evolved the neat hack of seeing red, and find it attractive, because tropical plants use the colour as an attractant to indicate the ripeness of fruit and the propagation-worthiness of their seeds. I shall hie me now to the Fainting Couch.

You can't have eschatology without scatology, eh?

It is not clear whether Robertson Davies had visited the Hunterian Museum when he wrote The Rebel Angels:
Where else but the Hunterian, after all, can you go to look at a bishop's rectum?

This is a rhetorical question -- Riddled has recently upgraded to Rhetor 2.2 and we are determined to get full value for the investment -- so do not feel obliged to provide an answer, even if you can think of one.


Image not so clear here, but more of the background is visible:

Some would call for a revival of this old tradition of "Dissecting clergy" (not to mention "Dissecting generals" and "Dissecting statesmen"), but we could not possibly comment.